This Just Inbox: Barbara Bona’s waterfalls, teacups, stepladders and potato chips

During my mother’s childhood in her country of origin, a neighbor might swing by your house and deliver a plate full of chow, delicacies or baked goods. Local custom was that when you returned the plate to them a few days later, you never gave it back empty, but loaded it with the fruits of your own kitchen labors.

When I was a waiter my boss used to dress me down if he caught me traveling empty-handed between the ground floor and the storeroom in the basement. He had grown up in a four-storey Brooklyn brownstone, he explained, and his mother would admonish him if he traveled between floors without carrying anything. “There’s always something that needs to be brought up or down,” she’d say.

These lessons are universal, and no one knows them better than logistics coordinators for shipping companies. If a container crosses the Pacific loaded with Toyotas and goes back empty, that’s a huge waste of fuel. But despite their best efforts, it happens all the time. And even if they weigh different amounts, 1,000 empty containers take up the same amount of space as 1,000 full containers, meaning the ships are forced to make the same amount of trips each way.

That will change if Dutch entrepreneur René Giesbers’ Cargoshell folding shipping container concept makes it into production. When empty, the Cargoshell can be folded flat, taking up only 25% of its original volume. Ships can carry four times as many empty containers as full. And the Cargoshell is made from composites rather than steel, which give off far less CO2 during the production process.

A video of the prototype is below. Non-Dutch-speakers will not be able to follow what they’re talking about, but you can fast forward to 1:20 to see the ten seconds where they unfold the thing.

(more…)

Anyone who’s ever moved house knows you’ve got to put everything in boxes, which is why U-Haul sells them.

Shipping companies figured this out as early as the 1700s; prior to that you had the “break bulk” cargo system, which meant scores of dockworkers going up and down gangplanks with bolts of fabric and sacks and whatnot across their shoulders. But the boxes and crates loaded onto ships (and later trains) differed in size, shape and composition depending on where they came from. Through the 1800s, some were made of wood, others of iron.

In the 20th century, organizations ranging from British railroad consortiums to the U.S. Army all made efforts to standardize their own shipping boxes, but it wasn’t until 1956 that an innovation appeared which has taken root around the globe and is still with us today: The invention of the shipping container.

American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean came up with what’s called “intermodal” shipping containers, that is to say, a box that could be loaded on a ship, train or truck. The cost savings was staggering and sounded the death knell for longshoremen: What once cost $5.86 per ton to load now cost only 16 cents.

Coming up with a standard-sized box might not sound like a big deal, but the intermodal concept was an early success in systems design, something like what Apple does with iPods, iTunes and iMacs. Much of the things in our homes, including the computer I’m typing this on, the monitor you’re reading it from, and the chairs we’re both sitting in, spent time in McLean’s boxes.

(Side note: Entrepreneur McLean, who only had a high school education and starting off pumping gas but later amassed a fortune of $400 million, has a fascinating life story loaded with business lessons too convoluted to encapsulate here–take a look. Said the then-U.S.-Secretary-of-Transportation Norman Mineta upon Mclean’s death, “A true giant, Malcom revolutionized the maritime industry in the 20th century. His idea for modernizing the loading and unloading of ships, which was previously conducted in much the same way the ancient Phoenicians did 3,000 years ago, has resulted in much safer and less-expensive transport of goods, faster delivery, and better service. We owe so much to a man of vision, ‘the father of containerization,’ Malcom P. McLean.”)

(more…)

Wooden ships used to set sail from New York fully laden with American goods to bring to the Old World. If the trade balance was perfect, they would unload their stuff in Europe and sail back to America loaded up with an equal amount of European goods; but since more Europeans wanted American resources than vice versa, that wasn’t the case.

After unloading in Europe, something was needed to load the empty ships up with for ballast for the return journey. At the time cobblestones were the cheapest, densest, most easily mass-produced and most compact units of weight around, and their squarish shapes made them space-efficient and easy to stack. They became the ballast of choice.

I like to imagine that cobblestones then started piling up around New York docks, after thousands of dockworkers got free, mandatory take-home paperweights. (“What the hell am I supposed to do with this? It’s the 1600s and I’ve never touched a piece of paper in my life.”) But most likely some European mentioned to the Americans “Oh by the way, you can make roads out of these bricks. We’ve been doing it since the 15th century.”

The end result is that you can see tons of cobblestone streets in New York, Boston and elsewhere, often close to the water. Cobblestones were holy hell on carriage wheels and they meant horses would have to wear horseshoes, but they had an added technological advantage: In that pre-asphalt and pre-storm-drain era, they allowed water to run between the individual stones, preventing mud build-up and ruts that carts would get stuck in.

Stay tuned for “Shaped by Our Shipping, Part 2: Thinking inside the box.”

(more…)

I can’t remember the last time I saw a bookmark that made me smile, but Yuriliku Design’s GreenMarker reference tabs do the trick. Designer Koji Ikegami admits that the “bookmarks” are simply made from 3M’s Post-It notes (apparently creased down the center of each blade for verisimilitude), but you’ve gotta give the guy an “A” for creativity. Comes in packs of 25.

(more…)

My favorite feature of Japan’s now-defunct Nakagin Capsule Tower apartments is the neat fold-down desk you see above. The parallelogram cross-section cleverly positions the desk at sitting height, yet still leaves a little bit of counter space when it’s flipped up into the wall.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower may be dead and its cool parallelogram desk forgotten, but its space-saving spirit lives on not only in the capsule hotels of Japan, but in airports in the UK and soon, New York City’s Times Square.

Let’s back up a second. Years ago Simon Woodroffe, an ex-stage-designer turned business mogul, was on an airplane when, in his own words: “I was lucky enough to get an upgrade to the sleeper bed in British Airways first class. I went to sleep with the conundrum of how to make a Japanese capsule hotel acceptable in the west and woke up realising the solution was around me: all I needed to do was find the designer of the BA first class cabin and ask them to help me design a hotel.”

By 2003 Woodroffe had tapped Studio Conran to design his new Yotel capsule hotels, and their Red-Dot-Award-winning design subsequently launched in 2007.

(more…)

Racine, Wisconsin-based John Villareal’s suh-weet Futurist Bicycle Design is intended for “the future as materials and manufacturing advance,” he writes. “Our ability to manufacture lighter frames with increasing strength of materials will allow us to make shapes that today would structurally fail.” To that end, he has stripped away as many structural elements as possible and jazzed up what’s left over.

We dig the hubless wheels, hubless pedal-crank assembly, and that crazy single point of connection for the crossbar–is that a hinge, to make the bike smaller for storage?

(more…)

As you’ll see in the videos below, there’s a bit of a public debate going on in France about what constitutes excess packaging, started by a public-awareness commercial attacking what they refer to as (loosely translated) the “overpack.” (And no, you don’t need to speak French to understand what’s going on in the videos.)

In retaliation, a company called Elipso Packaging made their own, somewhat silly commercial:

Call me crazy, but I’m with the first group. You’re telling me the options are too much packaging or absolutely none? C’est ridiculous!

via packaging uqam

(more…)

The husband-and-wife team of designers Jeffrey McGrew and Jillian Northrup are the force behind Because We Can, a design-build company that specializes in sustainable interior design and custom furniture. The California-based company uses only sustainable, reclaimed and/or eco-friendly products, and it’s hard not to be impressed with the results, like their reclaimed lumber benches for the offices of solar power company SunPower Corporation. Check out the raw material, which looks like the weather has been beating the crap out of it for decades:

Add a little (okay, a lot) of elbow grease…

(more…)

Final Cut isn’t just the name of video editing software. A Missouri-based company by the same name produces these brilliant saw blades, which have a simple why-didn’t-I-think-of-that addition that cuts your workload in half: sandpaper discs adhered to the side. The result of cutting and sanding your work in one step is absurdly smooth cuts with no tearout, ready for stain or finishing.

Also, you needn’t purchase entire blades from them to get the benefits–they also sell just the adhesive-backed sandpaper discs, which you can just apply yourself.

(more…)

Woah!

Antonio Scarponi, founder of Conceptual Devices, has worked out a way to fold your regular hoodie into a laptop bag, baby carrier, pillow, backpack and strap bag. Memorize it to impress people in a pinch. Might also be good for that lazy look (come on, we know you can pull it off).

Follow the instructions below or watch more videos. More information here.

(more…)